Friday, July 11, 2008

Since I started this blog, I thought it was odd that one could only easily read a blog in reverse chronological order. I even flipped the order of the archive at first until it did something weird or I just decided to go with the flow and not confuse readers.

Godin discussed this question a long time ago, so it's not like I'm the only one wondering. He even in one post I've lost in his archives discussed the difficulty in plumbing the depths of said archives (irony).

I have put a link to my first post over to the right to make it easier to start at the beginning, but I remember Godin suggesting something like an index. Tags attached to each post can be used to search using the search box up at the top, kind of like an index. However that leaves it up to the reader to find appropriate and consistently used tags and forces them to do the search, generating kind of a fragmented posting thread, if you will.

I think what I'm going to do is create my own index. Nonfiction books do this to let the reader know where to find all the references to a common subject. I know to expect readers to go through all 100 plus of my posts is a bit unrealistic. Some posts would probably loose their impact and readers would get bored, skipping and scanning, maybe missing my brilliance. So, the plan is to go back through and assign consistent tags more like categories. Some blogs call them categories even, which made it dawn on me to use them that way. Then I can automatically group posts that follow a common thread using pre-linked searches.

This will be kind of like reassembling what could be considered chapters that were just created in fragments of time. I'm thinking like what they did with the X-Files: releasing a collection of DVDs of just those episodes that follow the main series' mythology, leaving out the stand-alone episodes.

Sound good? I'll be working on this for awhile, deciding what categories and so forth, but I'll post about it when I'm done. And, of course, the new index will show up in the sidebar to the right. Let me know, please, if you have any suggestions about this idea or if you want to vent about the same thing.